BlackBerry Confirms They’re Releasing The QWERTY Slider Phone

Over the past couple of months we’ve seen and heard rumours that BlackBerry may release a QWERTY slider smartphone powered by Android and though the combination of the two seems odd, the company officially confirmed those rumours in their latest earnings report.

In the report, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said that the “Priv” smartphone as it’s now called, “combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity with the expansive mobile application ecosystem available on the Android platform.” He also confirmed that it’d arrive by the end of the year “in major markets in-store and online,” with more details to be revealed in the next few weeks.

The device itself seems pretty interesting. It boasts a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that kids of the early 2000s will likely be mostly familiar with. It’s also a BlackBerry device running Android, not a weird forked version of the OS, and its screen offers a wraparound display similar to the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. It’ll also come packed with a 18-megapixel camera.

As for earnings, its likely this new turn towards Android may have something to do with the company’s revenue for this quarter being $490 million, a little more than half of their results this time last year.